Circle round, rosy friends, circle round.
Lend me your nosy ears and close your mouths.
We know not what we say.
I would tell you something
if there was a way.

That’s the step.

That’s what I had been wondering. Like, what is next. All this time, I wanted to stop lying but didn’t know what to do instead. That’s it. The next step is stop lying. It seems simple in retrospect. I had a friend in AA who used to say helping a person not drink is as hard as teaching a rock how to hold still. It should be easy, right, since that is literally all it can do. But try getting a rock to understand that.

It seems to me like the solution to every problem is the same solution: Stop doing the problem. But people want to have a summit about it instead. Make a list of ways to solve the problem and the longer the list the longer they get to keep the problem. And then they want you to participate in it, for or against, and you only have so much time too, and you have your own problems to do. So no I’m not going to get out the money and donate and vote-march and do the work and raise the vibration and do my part just to keep you guessing. You want to have a problem, be my guest.

Guest/Host: Creating The Ghost Relationship
Leave a note
Tell them what time breakfast is
How to get out
How to come back
Where is the fruit? 

Don’t waste your life trying to prove a point, sayeth the Lord.

It’s June, early June, cool June. It looks like the end of the world outside because of the smoke from the Canada wildfires, but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. I have work later. (I would never.) The news says to stay inside but it’s just a suggestion. This week has been a little different. Today is the 7th. On Monday the 5th my phone was shut off and I’m not too concerned about it. I can use it at home on wi-fi, so I only don’t have a phone when I go out, as in olden times. This week I’ve only had one short engagement each day and a lot of free time. So on Monday I went out for a long journey to run errands and there is a coffee shop in that neighborhood that I always treat myself to when I do that. But somehow I missed the bus from my house even though I had been tracking it on the Transit app. The next one was coming in twenty-three minutes. So I walked across the bridge and caught the next bus on the other side. I couldn’t listen to music because no wi-fi but then on the bus there was wi-fi and I listened to the Weeknd and Chet Baker plus Call Me By Your Name and Take Me To Church. The songs queue up and then I can still spin them after I get off. Spring of ’23 has been a really special season. It feels like fall after the brutal heat of May. It smells like fall with the smoke in the air. A few of my friends and I use this app called Be Real where it sends you a prompt at a random time each day and you’re supposed to take a photo of whatever you happen to be looking at and your phone’s other camera simultaneously takes a photo of you looking at that thing. You all post them and see what each other’s life is like at that moment. I mean, most of the time you don’t see the notification though, so then you can just take the photo whenever you want to, which is like cheating.

I didn’t know Arrested Development came back after Season Three. So I’m re-watching it on Netflix for the past couple of weeks and all of a sudden I realize I’m watching an episode I’ve never seen and everyone looks different. I actually Googled who plays Lindsay Funke in Season Four but it turns out it’s the same person. Anyway I’m into Season Five now and I’m still sort of enjoying it. I like how they’re just walking in and out of abandoned, unfinished, semi-occupied model homes and running into each other everywhere. I can’t keep track of which twin is which. Actually a huge fan of the Tony Wonder storyline. I’ve been writing poems. It’s scary how I can think they’re good at one point and later understand that they aren’t. It’s similar to how cream cheese and strawberries taste like garbage now and yogurt tastes like perfume and the cats’ chicken pate smells like ammonia to me. I’ve been wrong about everything. I want to ask you if you are OK in the smoke but we don’t really talk like that. We didn’t ask each other if we were OK in the pandemic. I didn’t know there was an air quality alert level higher than red but there are two. It goes green, yellow, orange, red, purple, maroon. Last night and this morning we were in maroon. They don’t have any levels higher than that, although I still think they made up the last two last night. But I might as well stop writing this, if all I’m going to do is lie. Right? I tried to tell you.

The days keep passing by and now it is the ninth. They say that’s Friday and that I have to be here to receive the people when they come in from the street and to find out what they need and sort them out. For most of the day, I’ll do that. It’s just as well to have something to do today, all I did yesterday was try to arrange a poem for no reason. I would understand if I were a conductor arranging a piece of music for an orchestra to play. But nobody is waiting for this. No one has tickets. What am I doing? I had awakened to my phone telling me it forgave me and thanks for the money. I hadn’t meant to give it so many. I tried not to be dismayed, but the auto-pay had taken the whole outstanding amount instead of the bare minimum to be let back in, and now I was seventy-six dollars short on everything else. Not the end of the world. I still paid my rent (late, obviously, you know what day it is). Then I had enough to buy cat litter and tinned meats for the pets. So I decided to do that, but instead I spent most of the day alternately looking at the smoke and arranging the nonsense. I finally took a dismal nap at six p.m. and woke at six thirty-four to my phone saying the bus will go to the pet supply store in five minutes. I won’t make it, said someone in my head, but we did. After buying the pet supplies, I had no time for indecision because the bus came right back the other way and shipped us home. Then I walked back to where I had seen some things along the route and photographed them.

You’re wondering how to be alone. The key is the stuff. There are things all around you, like yellow bird paintings and pianos. You literally just look at them. And that’s it. The software will take care of the rest. You use your feet to get to them, or you can go by on the bus, but make sure you’re paying attention. By the time I had finished collecting, it was only a couple of hours until the restaurants started packing up their leftovers so I went into the app and reserved something and then climbed up to my apartment to feed the kittens. You know what else is still on? It’s Always Sunny, for some reason. While the kittens were eating their chicken and pumpkin meats, the internet told me the first two episodes of the sixteenth season had dropped, so I watched them while I waited for dinnertime. The characters are doing spot-on impressions of their old selves. I started watching this show when I moved here in 2007. If I were still the same person I was then, I would have thrown myself into the Schuylkill River way before this season. But nothing ever stops changing as long as it’s still going because just this week, Frank and Charlie found out they have a bathroom in the closet and a whole empty bedroom behind their false walls. After the show I took another nap with an alarm set for nine-oh-six. Then put on my shoes and took a night stroll to collect a bowl of grains and greens and toasty pecans prepared by skilled artisans on Penn’s campus and walked home through the warm night nibbling on it.

It’s the spine — the densest
string — that makes things
happen, makes you
wonder
if the sticking in
or not
of it
is almost
not even
a factor.

It is far better to open a poem with No one tells than with It’s the spine. My creative writing professor wouldn’t even approve of the word it’s existing let alone being literally the most important word in a poem. A poem is a strict economy. Still, though, it is the spine. And that’s kind of important. It’s the spine — the densest string — that makes things happen. Makes you wonder. No one tells the dumb sun that lights them that men are not to be looked upon. That’s from the one about subjects and objects. Something about touching and not being touched, and yet. I don’t know whether the part about trash and roses and the ten a.m. sidewalk goes with it. I’ve been saying something and it isn’t good. I’m going to put a clue where you would look. Like a hyper-local, super-specific bottle-episode cold open. That’s from the one about action being automatic, about your mind and what it does when you are doing things it wouldn’t.

Go with the original. Go with God.

I remember how D. used to look forward to the arranging of what she called the pretty words, she always wanted to see them whenever they were done. Maybe that’s what the point of it is. I liked her binders full of candy-colored pen and handwritten names of real people four-thousand two-hundred twenty-nine miles away who were brave and went onscreen and let us see them before anyone else did. In two-thousand-six I remember wondering if it was really OK to put one’s photo on the internet. They say not to write about your dreams. I’m going to tell you one in a minute. In the early 2000s a different H. said to me, “You just need a shady, lazy friend to show you the way.” I remember how M. used to look up songs on YouTube for me to sing and I would sit by his side and get totally lost in singing them. We had some good times. Why is this world so poison to us? Why do the rays from the star that the very planet I was born upon goes around burn the naturally-occurring skin of my body whenever I go outside? Huh? Explain it to me, then, if everything is so normal. If everything makes so much sense.

I had a wonderful dream of snow last night. A blue sky and snow falling and twinkling in the sunlight and snow all over the ground with tire tracks in it and then I was riding in a car through the snow and I told the driver I was usually afraid to ride in a car in the snow and he said he didn’t even think about it because he was so used to it. The driver was someone I actually knew years ago, many years ago. In the dream we were happy to see each other and catch up on what we had been up to since then and I think we were all staying at the same place (but not in the same room, which is noteworthy) because we were all performing in some type of show together. The night before, we had thought we were sleeping in like a closed office building where we were not supposed to be, but by morning it had turned into a regular little cheap sleepy motel. It was the night between June 18th and 19th, which was really last night, and I had worked at my job on the 18th, as I really did, and had to be back there again on the 19th, which I really do. I had been on the phone with my sister and asked her what time it was and she said, “It’s 10:10.” I had assumed she meant at night. But then in a few minutes I opened the drapes, you know how motel rooms have those very heavy drapes, and I opened them and it was full daylight and there was the blue sky and sunshine and the snow was twinkling down. I realized I couldn’t make it to work, as I was not even in town and here it was morning. But it was OK for some reason and then I reunited with all the other people who were traveling together and then came the scene about driving in snow. The internet says a dream of driving in snow can mean a lot of different things, and falling snow means courage toward doing something I’ve always been afraid to do, and that a dream of snow in summer indicates a happy surprise. The dream was so nice that when I woke up I felt like my whole life was different.

I stopped smoking weed earlier this month. Since COVID I hadn’t been quite the same, and I thought if I’m going to be smoking Canada all summer, I might want to give my throat and lungs and a break. I meant to switch to edibles, but I didn’t get around to it, and now that I’m used to just sitting with my depression in the evenings, I thought let’s go with it. That cut down on the amount of snacks I was craving so I thought fine why not cut out sugar too. But I know Elliott Smith cut out sugar shortly before dying of stab wounds, so you want to be careful with that. Then I thought I was getting the flu, but it turns out that’s what sugar withdrawal feels like. It passed after a few days. So this happened easily and suddenly, the same way I gave up alcohol in my mid-twenties, and meat in 2008, and coffee in 2022. As the song goes, so what do you do? Well I go for walks, eat walnuts and berries, listen to Chet Baker Deep Cuts on shuffle on Apple, sing my favorite Tom Petty songs, stare at things. There’s plenty. And then there is always work. Somebody said, “To sustain oneself upon this planet is a pastime, not a burden.” It barely even matters anymore who said what. The robots remember everything except your name. I understand the tendency to be angry at the robots, but I think it’s for the same reason you get angry at anything — you see yourself in them. When was the last time you heard somebody say something and you didn’t already know what it was going to be? I remember one time G. said, “I’m not one of these people who is anti-work.” I replied, “I’m anti-work. [beat] But we might mean different things when we say work.” I had gotten no further than “We might mean different—” when he was already replying with a smile. “Yes, we might.”

“Is it possible that, in areas outside addition and subtraction, statistical regularities in text actually do correspond to genuine knowledge of the real world?”

I have a stack of ten Marble Composition notebooks that I have kept for several decades. When I was young, I would use writing to keep myself in my head and out of reality. When I was older, I would do the same. I thought I might read through them and see what can be done. If nothing else, maybe paper mache. Entire sections of the later notebooks were left blank. I have a plan for what to do with that paper, I thought I might make little books. You know, little blank books with little pages. I have a beautiful gunmetal blue Dahle brand paper cutter, a remnant from the Spake office, and I love to use it. Recently I attended a zine workshop via Zoom and to my delight it got crashed by someone projecting a pornographic video onto our screens. That had never happened to me before, and I started using Zoom at the beginning of the pandemic like a lot of people. The host ended the meeting and then restarted it and then the naked person was gone. The hosting organization sent out an email later apologizing to everyone, restating their commitment to creating safe and inclusive spaces, and promising they were taking steps to make sure it never happens again. But I was there — I saw the nice man in the rattan swing chair reclining on a pile of throw pillows, enjoying himself — and they can’t take that away from me.

I think the truth is in the scriptures but I think it’s just written over and over again in these crazy ways, but I think there’s love there. And I think if someone loves you, you should love them too. And you’ll say yeah but people think they love you but really they love this idea of you that they have created. Yes that’s true, but you have to ask yourself why did they pick you? Yes they think all the wrong ideas about you, but they are choosing you every day to be wrong about, and that’s love, or at least that’s not nothing. It might be nice to ride the same bus along the same muddy road every day and there is someone who gets on who just sits next to you. I plan to spend my golden years taking small bites, chewing carefully, and stepping cautiously because I plan to live alone and do not want to fall or choke on something. Every day is someone’s birthday and Ellen’s is today. One time I asked her, “Ellen, if I ever write a novel, what do you want your name to be?” She said, “Let me think about it, Heather.” Several months later we were sitting at her kitchen counter drinking coffee out of little tea cups on an overcast day, and out of the clear blue sky she said, “Heather, I thought about it. Ellen.”

When you stop smoking weed, you start remembering your dreams. It’s been worth it. There was the dream of snow, and then a dream of my family in the big second-floor storefront apartment with the Delaware River outside and an Orca surfacing under a bridge that wasn’t the Ben Franklin Bridge but was blue like the Ben Franklin Bridge. (Later, I saw it in the news, it was the Verrazzano Narrows. Some fishermen had seen a whale surfacing there which the marine biologists said was normal but the fishermen had found it amazing and I had found the photograph very familiar from my dream even though it was not an Orca. In my imagination, whales are black and white like cats and cows, but that was definitely the bridge.) And then last night, you were back again. I hadn’t seen you since the one where you jumped off the church building. We were kissing in this one, which was just as awkward as it used to be in real life, but I liked it. We had to knock it off though because there was a lot going on. We had arrived at your workplace before dawn. You worked in this big laboratory type of place, the type of place people can get murdered for working at — murdered for like, international reasons. I hoped you weren’t very important there so that wouldn’t happen to you, but you seemed kind of important though. You seemed like sort of a misunderstood genius, like in real life. But not misunderstood by everyone. I met a few other people there, and they seemed to feel affectionate toward you and protective. I didn’t understand your work but I was proud of you. The campus was outside of the city, with little meadows around it with dewy grass and fences. It reminded me a little of that behavioral health facility in the Northeast that I went to that time when I had to do observations for my Master’s Degree. And a little of the West Virginia Capitol Complex in Charleston and a little of the fields where we used to feed the pony when we were children. Inside the buildings, it wasn’t like any of those places. It was darker inside than you would expect for a laboratory, like it was part laboratory, part church sanctuary, part college dormitory. You knew everybody. You were in a great hurry. While I was meeting people, other genius types, you took off somewhere to deliver the results of something. I understood it was important but I was a little salty that you just left me there. I had no idea where we were, even. A girl I was talking with from a different department laughed and shook her head. She wasn’t surprised you had brought a friend out there and then absentmindedly left without them. She was familiar with brilliance. She said she would give me a ride, which she did. I don’t remember to where.

In 2007 I met a Grade A individual who said, “Are they the kind of person who is always… having… an emergency?” I laughed nervously. He was ostensibly asking about someone I was ostensibly complaining about, but slowly over the next decade I went Ohhhhhhhh, oh yes, yes they were and so am I, but I would love to not be. Once you decide to stop doing the problem, it really doesn’t take that much longer to actually stop. It’s the best teaching from Buddhism, for me. Whatever you’re doing wrong, just stop it. Just like literally stop it. From what I understand, in that religion they don’t teach any kind of repentance, they say just leave off from doing the harmful activities, effective immediately, and then just do better things instead from now on. It only works on the honor system, which is maybe why it isn’t super popular in my culture, but what do I know, I do not have my finger on the pulse. I grew up in a parking lot in the snow. I grew up in the hot sun waiting by the road. I grew up blocking the glare. Tell your mom I’m sorry about the cheese thing, but I wasn’t housebroken back then. One of my best friends doesn’t like it when I say things about myself being feral or not being housebroken or whatever, but I mean, I don’t like it either.

They were already telling stories before I was born, how this or that meant what to them. They taught me to fight their battles and not my own. I can’t keep falling for this online. The power was out just before 2 a.m. In fifteen minutes, it came back on, but I was shaken and dressed and ready to run. In here, we depend on the window machine. Without it, the room is an oven. Before bed, I had watched the news. A man outside Cincinnati had killed his kids, believing sinfully that they were his. Seven hundred and five people that we know of had died at sea. I cared but was supposed to care differently. Since my Dad died I have terrible claustrophobia. I used to take elevators and subways and ride the Megabus through Lincoln Tunnel, even rode in airplanes a few times, but I can’t do those things now. Flying in a plane is like watching TV. It’s unbelievable. You must be famous. You must be rich. You must not be terrified of naturally terrifying things. You must be thinking of something else. Billionaires are God’s, children too. Whether you ignore the apostrophe or the comma, brother, that’s on you.

On days when there aren’t any outs and you have no idea and the birds are doing their shouts along the wet sidewalks like children without schedules, from the corner of the room comes a whirring. From the center of the room, a blinking. From around the corner, a plunk. Early in the morning, beaming. Nell could walk on eggshells by the time he learned to walk. No one wanted to hear about it, so he was slow to talk. He wandered, somber as a zombie, not a thought, not a head in sight, but listen — there is no reason to be hungry tonight. All that glitters is art. The first moon is a quarter, but all moons are full in photos. You’ve been saying something and it isn’t good. I’m going to put a clue where even you would look. But I ain’t tellin’ nobody nothin’. If they want to know what time it is, they can stare straight at the sun. Pretending for fun is fun, unlike most of the pretending anyone actually does.

At least in ancient places they used to put the rumors in a bowl. So the more they would say about you, the more you could hold. In the beginning, God made you and me both. And then he made a different sort of girl because he saw you needed one. He didn’t make me one but I was not forsaken. I simply asked him not to burden me the way he did to you. How could you think there’s no trick to it. Buy happiness, they said, it’s less materialistic, but when you get down to the bottom of it, you can see the object. If they don’t respond to the arrow, you’re supposed to leave them be, but she doesn’t always. Sometimes she uses her teeth. No par for the king. Visitors will be toads. Cruel world as a punchline. Symptoms as far as the eye can see. Jobs in the real world and school in dreams. Leverage without hinges and engines without itches and bottled breaks with broken stops, unedited as expected. 10 AM roses and trash in the sun, concessions and carousel tunes, but you got it all wrong. Horse music goes around, comes around. The roses are growing. The dark morning with the full moon stands outside our house. Can we come out? Circle round, rosy friends, circle round. Lend me your nosy ears and close your mouths. We know not what we say. I would tell you something, if there was a way. 

I’ve long been dreaming of the day when people would commonly start their statements with “As a language model–” and now they finally are. I’m not sure it means the average person is fully aware that they are a language model and that everyone they know and have ever known was a language model too and nobody is the same model and emojis don’t look the same between Android and iPhone, but maybe, as SEPTA used to say, we’re getting there. I tried to put my username in but the Swipe wouldn’t take it and I ended up saying:
Heretofore, hearthstone, heartbroken,
Heathrow, hedgerows, heatedly,
hatchetfish, bathrobe, hardheaded,
Haverford, heterodoxy,
Hagerstown, bathroom, hedgehogs,
hereditary, heresies, heartthrobs. So if the whole herd ran off a cliff, would you? Of course not, but I will if they don’t do it soon.

Still it’s June. It’s Pride Month, which I guess is not really meant for me as a cisgender female heterosexual lady who loves men, but the gay community has been very lenient with letting everyone join in. You don’t have to be gay or bi or trans, you can be pan or demi or sapio or litho or cupio or ace or auto or queer or even just quirky. No word is too dirty, no dirt is too wordy. I guess my sexuality can best be described by the 1955 short story Of Missing Persons by Jack Finney. The protagonist, by coincidence, finds a secret and unlikely way to get to the people he has always wanted to be with. It would change his life to be with them. But then he doesn’t act right. He doubts himself and others, and the door slides shut, and the man behind the counter at the travel agency — although not an unkind man at all — must pretend to never recognize him again in order to protect his loved ones and their way of life and the whole structure and functioning of the unmarked path to paradise. He gives him his money back, looks him in the eye and says, “You left this on the counter last time you were here. I don’t know why.” And I look around because I hear the startling sound of sobbing but to my horror I realize it’s me.

They’re everybody’s favorite / they live across the hall /
they aren’t quite romantically palatable /
you know who they are. / It me. / Maybe it you,
but not probably.

God, such a beautiful dream of one of you last night, and when I say one of you, please know it isn’t that I can’t remember which one. It was a beautiful dream of one of you wonderful beings who I have been blessed to know in this lifetime. I won’t say your name in case you have waking complications. In the dream I went to visit you, still living where you used to, on the fifth floor of a large, historic apartment building. It was only later after waking that I remembered that isn’t where you lived at all. In real life you lived in an apartment in a small row house, but in the dream I was going back to the exact same place where you used to be and there you still were, but the building was half remodeled and some wings were under construction. Your apartment and hallway were undisturbed but seemed modern so maybe that part had already been done. Something happened. We were lying together in bed just reminiscing. It seemed for a moment as though something else might, like it does in the movies. But then I went out for something, for breakfast or to get coffee for us. I don’t think I did a good job explaining where I was going, or that I would be right back. And I wasn’t, because I got very mixed up. Upon returning to the apartment building I couldn’t find your floor again because now there were half-floors too and the staircase was not central but separate flights of stairs leading up or down from different corners of rooms and different ends of hallways. In some places, the lights were out. I met the manager or owner of the building. A tall and refined and imposing woman with long dark hair, she was somewhere between the ages of fifty and seven hundred and fifty, and she was very beautiful and she knew that. She had no patience, but she had manners for days and answered my stupid wayfinding questions with the utmost grace. At one point I was up on floor seven before realizing I had gone too far and started looking for some dark corner stairway that would lead down but they only seemed to go higher which I knew couldn’t be the right way. I have to go down from here to get to the fifth, so I focused on it with all I had. Five, five, five, five, five, floor five, I have to get back to floor five, where the lights are on and the windows are big and uncovered and the daylight is shining in and nothing is dusty, and you’re wondering where I went. I didn’t mean to leave you, I can prove it if I can just hold onto your coffee until I find you, but do I even still have it? Where did I set it down? And then I go through some modern metal fire door by pressing on the bar and finding it surprisingly unlocked and when it gives way and the door opens suddenly, there is the carpeted hallway and the elevators that were there all along, and I knew the way to your door but when I reached it, it was open and the apartment was empty. I began to walk down the hallway and started hearing your voice from the room at the end. The door was open there too and there you are on someone’s bed, talking, and someone’s lovely legs are just in view. I hold my hands up in apology just as you look up and see me and I step back before anyone else notices. You get up and excuse yourself politely, nodding to me that you’ll be with me in a moment. Then you join me in a sitting area in a little lobby by the elevators across from the big windows with a view of what looks like the rooftops of Old City, and it turns out I do have your coffee, and I explain that it was hard for me to find your floor again and you acknowledge that the building is under construction. We sit and drink our coffee and I can’t remember what you’re saying. You’ve shaved your head now, like I used to do, and I’m sorry to see that because I really liked your long hair but it really doesn’t matter, because I’ve remembered your coffee order, and you are relieved to see me. There’s another part of the dream, featuring a vanilla ice cream cone. It’s later and we are outside in the sun and the ice cream is melting and you are not acting like yourself and just letting it melt all over the place and you’re smiling and talking and showing off for your friends and glancing over at me and I wake up grateful and glad to have this new dream, at least as beautiful as all the rest, and I will treasure it and you forever and ever. Amen. 

We are just past the Ides of August. These blog posts can never decide if they want to make sense. Should I tell you about my day or these other things? Next time we’ll talk about money — how easy it is to make and how much I love it. And going to Elizabeth City — how I spent a summer there as a runaway, among other things. Also those vague memories and how to find them — dreams is one thing, but what about—? It will be soon enough. Stay in tune. Stay touched.

In the morning I’m not depressed. In the afternoon I’m a little depressed. In the evening I’m depressed. At night I’m asleep and I enjoy my dreams. In the morning I eat nuts and berries. In the afternoon I eat yogurts and salads. In the evening I eat pizzas and hoagies. At night I don’t eat and I enjoy my dreams. In the morning I keep my clothes on unless there’s a drawing club session. In the afternoon I go for walks with or without guests with questions. In the evening I keep my clothes on unless there is figure painting. At night I keep my nightclothes on and enjoy my dreams. There’s always stuff to do for a living in the morning. There is often something to do for a living in the afternoon. Sometimes there’s something to do for a living in the evening. There’s stuff to do for a living at night but I don’t do it because I’m asleep enjoying my dreams. I go out in the morning for errands and walks and work. I go out in the afternoon for walks or work. I don’t go out in the evening unless there is work. At night I stay inside and enjoy my dreams. Do you need that one friend who your other friends don’t know? Where you don’t necessarily have to be you? That can be me. Come see me in dreamland.